The City & the Country no. 39

Curious generational event while on the 103 bus. I was studying my book when a black guy sitting next to me moaned in a voice worthy of Brando in The Godfather: “Charlie…”. Without thinking, without looking up or looking at the speaker, I simply continued, for him, “You was my brother…”. Then I realized I’d spoken aloud and glanced at the poor guy next to me, who was staring at me in suspicious bafflement. I suppose I could have murmured, “On The Waterfront… the taxi scene…” – but I felt this would have only compounded the weirdness, for him, and any more elaborate explanation would have made it only worse. We continued our journey without further incident. I attach today some pictures of my dear English Composition students. The setting is my office, where I teach all my classes. It holds up to 34 students. I shared it with the venerable Allen Ginsberg – until his death, I usually add, redundantly, although in a sense it is not only redundant but incorrect: he is in fact still in our office, for me at least, both before and enduringly, following his death. It’s an office larger than all but the college President’s, a seminar room give to Allen presumably because he was Allen, and which after he died I rebaptized via some initial transformations – I installed some 20 huge plants until I stopped teaching summer school for a while and feared for the survival of the plants, trees though some of them were. I took them home. One still survives in our sitting room.

For a while I kept Allen’s desk unoccupied and invited students to sit in his chair and absorb, through the seat, his lingering vibes. I set a bonsai tree on the desk – I cleared it of all else, in line with Allen’s extreme neatness and frugality. I then managed to kill the bonsai tree, somehow, and realized I was not born to be guardian of a shrine. (Some are.) Eventually, when fewer and fewer of my students knew who Allen was, had been, and is, I moved my stuff across the room and took his chair myself – not without a lurking sense of shame, of desecration, even – and so his desk is the mess it is today, thanks to me. Behind the students you can see an American flag – but it isn’t, it’s part of a wonderful painting by my wife, Claire. I still introduce the room as Allen’s (and mine), if only to explain why instead of a barren classroom they have a real room with books and mess in it – thank God! and thanks especially to the department Chair who placed me in Allen’s office rather as one might present a famous polar bear with a juicy tidbit or a Roman arena lion with a peculiarly plump and complaisant Christian.

I say this because with my upbringing among famous film stars and their ilk I offered Allen a feast of connections: he liked to enumerate how many of the people I knew in my childhood he had slept with, rather as in the genealogy game long played in gay circles whereby you can trace your ‘ancestry’ – degrees of historical separation, if you will – all the way back to Edward II, and, who knows, even farther back, along a tree of bedmates. (A complaisant story-teller I truly was, overcome to share a room with the author of ‘Howl,’ which I so well recalled reading in British boarding school.) Some of his own tales were, for me, classics, as when he was 3-in-a-bed in Tangier with Jack Kerouac and Sir John Gielgud. I’ve long wanted to dramatize this as a radio play. Those 3 voices! So – a major part of my joy, the other being my students themselves, during these soon-to-be-20 years of teaching at Brooklyn College, has been my wonderful, capacious, chaotic office/classroom, notorious, I suspect, among students past and present.